Time to share, to chat,
Can be hard to find, but find
We must! Or go mad!
Waking up next to the road in France was not entirely pleasant, but I have to say that I slept better than I have the past couple nights. It was just... noisy and rocky. Ugh.
The ride down the mountains, at least, was quite easy. We coasted nearly all the way to Perpignan, where we became lost due to some poorly-marked roads that are evidently not intended for cyclists. Silly French people, closing off perfectly good roads to people on bikes. Needless.
We did find a bike path, actually, that led down to the ocean, so that was alright. We stopped at a supermarket by the sea and got ingredients for caprese salad (tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil). As we stepped back out into the daylight, there were some strange men by our bikes. And they had bikes, too!
We chatted with them for a while. They had just met in Strasbourg (it's in France, in the Alsace region just next to Germany), and they were both on their way to Barcelona. One of them was using a recumbent bike, which evidently loved. He went on and on about the wind resistance being so low and all, and his friend said that, indeed, he was hard-pressed to keep up when the other was going 35 km/h. Yikes!
They were nice fellows, but we all had to get moving. We wrapped up lunch and parted ways. Evan and I took off up the coast, which we could unfortunately only follow for a short while. The road system here is designed to get from place to place, rather than to meander as one chooses along coastal routes. For this reason, it looks like much of our time in France will be spent hopping from city to city along generally the most direct path. Sigh.
So we were heading towards Narbonne. We didn't make it quite there, and elected to stop instead in a town called Sigean (which according to our map, has a large African animals preserve nearby). We bought some groceries and decided it was time to try out what we'd been wanting to try for some time: asking people where to find a good place to stay (and possibly getting hosted!). So we found a likely area just on the border of town and stepped up to ask a couple guys on their driveway where nearby might be reasonable to set up the tent. They advised us to go to an abandoned lot just down the street, and it was perfect! We weren't hosted, but maybe that will come in time.
For now, we'll eat our lentils with sauce and fried plantains. Then, we'll watch Repo Men until the battery on our computer runs out. Yes!